This book examines Irish economic development in the twentieth century compared with other European countries. It traces the growth of the Republic's economy from its separation from Britain in the early 1920s through to the present. It assesses the factors which encouraged and inhibited economic development, and concludes with an appraisal of the country's present state and future prospects.
Here Ireland's premier economic historian and one of the leading authorities on the Great Irish Famine examines the most lethal natural disaster to strike Europe in the nineteenth century. Between the mid-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, the food source that we still call the Irish potato had allowed the fastest population growth in the whole of Western Europe. As vividly described in Ó Gráda's new work, the advent of the blight phytophthora infestans transformed the potato from an emblem of utility to a symbol of death by starvation. The Irish famine peaked in Black '47, but it brought misery and increased mortality to Ireland for several years. Central to Irish and British history, European demography, the world history of famines, and the story of American immigration, the Great Irish Famine is presented here from a variety of new perspectives. Moving away from the traditional narrative historical approach to the catastrophe, Ó Gráda concentrates instead on fresh insights available through interdisciplinary and comparative methods. He highlights several economic and sociological features of the famine previously neglected in the literature, such as the part played by traders and markets, by medical science, and by migration. Other topics include how the Irish climate, usually hospitable to the potato, exacerbated the failure of the crops in 1845-1847, and the controversial issue of Britain's failure to provide adequate relief to the dying Irish. Ó Gráda also examines the impact on urban Dublin of what was mainly a rural disaster and offers a critical analysis of the famine as represented in folk memory and tradition. The broad scope of this book is matched by its remarkable range of sources, published and archival. The book will be the starting point for all future research into the Irish famine.
This text offers an examination of the economic history of the principal Arab countries, Turkey and Israel since 1918. Using the state as its major economic analysis, it charts the growth of national income and issues of welfare and distribution over two periods, 1918-1945 and 1945-1990. Important trends are explored, including the patterns of colonial economic management, import substitution, the impact of the 1970s oil boom, and the current process of liberalization and structural adjustment
"The roots of many problems facing Ireland's economy today can be traced to the first two decades following its independence. Opening previously unexplored areas of Irish history, this is the first comprehensive study of industrial development and attitudes coward industrialization during a pivotal period, from the founding of the Irish Free State to the Anglo-Irish Trade Treaty." "As one of the first postcolonial states of the 20th century, Ireland experienced strong tensions between the independence movement and the considerable institutional and economic inertia from the past. Daly explores these tensions and how Irish nationalism, Catholicism, and British political traditions influenced economic development. She thus sheds light on the evolution of economic and social attitudes in the newly independent state." "Drawing on a wide array of primary sources not yet generally accessible, Daly examines such topics as Irish economic thinking before independence; the conservative policies of W. T. Cosgrave's government in the first five years after independence; the growing division between the two major political parties over economic policy; Fianna Fail's controversial attempts to develop an independent - and nationalistic - economic policy; the largely unsuccessful attempt to develop native industries; the development of financial institutions; the political and social implications of economic change; the Anglo-Irish Trade Agreement of 1938; and comparisons with other economically emerging nations."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
For a country that can boast a distinguished tradition of political economy from Sir William Petty through Swift, Berkeley, Hutcheson, Burke and Cantillon through to that of Longfield, Cairnes, Bastable, Edgeworth, Geary and Gorman, it is surprising that no systematic study of Irish political economy has been undertaken. In this book the contributors redress this glaring omission in the history of political economy, for the first time providing an overview of developments in Irish political economy from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Logistically this is achieved through the provision of individual contributions from a group of recognized experts, both Irish and international, who address the contribution of major historical figures in Irish political economy along the analysis of major thematic issues, schools of thought and major policy debates within the Irish context over this extended period.
It is commonplace to assume that the twentieth-century British economy has failed, falling from the world's richest industrial country in 1900 to one of the poorest nations of Western Europe in 2000. Manufacturing is inevitably the centre of this failure: British industrial managers cannot organise the proverbial 'knees-up' in a brewery; British workers are idle and greedy; its financial system is uniquely geared to the short term interests of the City rather than of manufacturing; its economic policies areperverse for industry; and its culture is fundamentally anti-industrial. There is a grain of truth in each of these statements, but only a grain. In this book, Alan Booth notes that Britain's living standards have definitely been overtaken, but evidence that Britain has fallen continuously further and further behindits major competitors is thin indeed. Although British manufacturing has been much criticised, it has performed comparatively better than the service sector. The British Economy in the Twentieth Century combines narrative with a conceptual and analytic approach to review British economic performance during the twentieth century in a controlled comparative framework. It looks at key themes, including economic growth and welfare, the working of the labour market, and the performance of entrepreneurs and managers. Alan Booth argues that a careful, balanced assessment (which must embrace the whole century rather than simply the post-war years) does not support the loud and persistent case for systematic failure in British management, labour, institutions, culture and economic policy. Relative decline has been much more modest, patchy and inevitable than commonly believed.
Professor Dermot Keogh's Twentieth-Century Ireland, the sixth and final book in the New Gill History of Ireland series, is a wide-ranging, informative and hugely engaging study of the long twentieth century, surveying politics, administrative history, social and religious history, culture and censorship, politics, literature and art. It focuses on the consolidation of the new Irish state over the course of the twentieth century. Professor Keogh highlights the long tragedy of emigration, its effect on the Irish psyche and on the under-performance of the Irish economy. He emphasises the lost opportunities for reform of the 1960s and early 70s. Membership of the EU had a diminished impact due to short-term and sectionally motivated political thinking and an antiquated government structure. Professor Keogh looks at how the despair of the 1950s revisited the country in the 1980s as almost an entire generation felt compelled to emigrate, very often as undocumented workers in the United States. Professor Keogh also argues that the violence in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s was an Anglo-Irish failure which was turned around only when Britain acknowledged the role of the Irish government in its resolution. He extends his analysis of the twentieth-century to include a wide-ranging survey of the most contentious events—financial corruption, child sexual abuse, scandals in the Catholic Church—between 1994 and 2005. Twentieth-Century Ireland: Table of Contents - A War without Victors: Cumann na nGaedheal and the Conservative Revolution - De Valera and Fianna Fáil in Power, 1932–1939 - In the Time of War: Neutral Ireland, 1939–1945 - Seán MacBride and the Rise of Clann na Poblachta - The Inter-Party Government, 1948–1951 - The Politics of Drift, 1951&1959 - Seán Lemass and the 'Rising Tide' of the 1960s - The Shifting Balance of Power: Jack Lynch and Liam Cosgrave, 1966–1977 - Charles Haughey and the Poverty of Populism - Ireland in the New Century
